Contraction FREEBIE

The mission of the March of Dimes is to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth and infant mortality. Prodromal comes from the Greek word meaning precursor, and even though it only results in minimal cervical dilation, it’s considered an early stage of true labor—not false labor ( Source ). Some sources say that prodromal labor results in irregular contractions.

Some other simplified pronunciations of common word groups, which can equally be described as cases of elision, may also be considered (non-standard) contractions (not enshrined into the written standard language, but frequently expressed in written form anyway), such as wanna for want to, gonna for going to, y’all for you all, ya’ll for ya all in the South, and others common in colloquial speech.

RESULTS: The experience of precipitate labor was categorized in terms of physical experience (perception of labor length and contractions), psychological experience (relationship of how women perceived birth to their prenatal expectations, and emotional trajectory of disbelief, alarm panic, and relief), and external factors (support persons and hospital system).

A caveat here: I was about to quote a delightful poem by Cecco Angiolieri, the supremely irreverent and outrageous Sienese poet (a contemporary of Dante), a poem which is liberally sprinkled with elisions in the transcription I was reading, until I had a chance to look at a manuscript facsimile and saw that all of the supposedly elided words were in fact written out.

This is probably based both on the common knowledge that Norwegian has a more widespread use of letters like F , K and S ; disfavouring letters like C , Q , X and digraphs like PH (compared to English , Portuguese , Spanish , French , German , Swedish and Danish , which are (some of) the languages Norwegians are most familiar with); and that most Norwegians are so familiar with the Norwegian language that they don’t realise the great difference between the written and spoken language.